


Heartlines

by potentiality_26



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Crossover, M/M, Minor Violence, Near Death Experiences, Q is a Holmes, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2014-09-27
Packaged: 2018-02-18 19:58:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2360402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potentiality_26/pseuds/potentiality_26
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Oh, to have been matched with an accountant somewhere, Q would absently think as Bond crushed an extremely expensive communications device under his heel and took a woman with this or that piece of information to bed.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“If she stabs him,” Q would observe through gritted teeth.  “It’ll serve him right.”</em>
</p><p>Q and Bond are soulmates.  Between Q's family and Bond's... everything, it isn't as simple as it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heartlines

**Author's Note:**

> So, I discovered [this prompt](http://007kinkmeme.livejournal.com/1142.html?thread=188534#t188534) on the 007 kink meme about a year after it was posted. It's probably just as well that I'm tragically late to the party, because this a) is a crossover that was in no way requested and b) focuses on all the wrong things. That said, the prompt did inspire me, and even though I pretty much failed at writing a fill, there it is. Apologies all around. 
> 
> [A note about Mycroft in this story](http://potentiality-26.livejournal.com/63095.html)\- you can look at it now if you’re interested in my somewhat lengthy ruminations about this AU, or you can come back and read it later if, after or in the midst of reading, you find yourself angry about him and want to know what the hell I think I’m up to. That said, I do want to establish at the outset that Sherlock is Mycroft’s soulmate here. I’m not portraying it as romantic (though you're free to read it however you please), but if you have any reason to believe that it might bother you regardless of my efforts, steer clear. 
> 
> Finally, I'm American and this isn't Brit-picked. Apologies again.

Q didn’t like to blame Mycroft for what happened. True, Mycroft hadn’t given Q a lot of choice in the matter- but it was just as accurate to say that Q hadn’t given Q a lot of choice in the matter. He’d always thought of himself as the good younger brother, but in the end he’d gotten himself into more trouble than three Sherlocks combined, and in the end Mycroft hadn’t even had to ask. Q had been locked up in a little cell and when Mycroft came to visit him Q had seen Mycroft looking at him the way he used to look at Sherlock- like he was only a few steps away but there was still a wall between them too high to scale. Q hadn’t thought about it for more than a heartbeat before getting down on his knees, kissing his brother’s hand and swearing to do everything Mycroft asked from then on.

After that, everything had happened… not quickly, exactly, but with all the simple and inevitable precision of a line of dominos coming down one after the other. After that, if there was ever a moment when Q had had the chance to put his hand up and say, “Wait a minute, what about my happily ever after?” it had passed him by unnoticed.

But if he _had_ gotten the chance, Q would never have said those words, and that probably _was_ Mycroft’s fault- or perhaps it was the universe’s fault, through Mycroft. Q wasn’t sure.

Young people tended to grow up with… a somewhat inflated notion of what it was to have a soulmate. When they were very small, marriage was a barely understood concept, children popped into existence as if by magic and sex was nowhere on their radar. Given that, what could it be but a fairy tale, to know that written right over their hearts was the name of the person they would love all their life? The person who would give that life such meaning?

Q as a boy had had no such luxury. His elder brother, who he loved fiercely, would come home from school whenever possible, and Q would spend nearly every waking moment with him. Sherlock, a few years older than Q, would be sullen and cold and avoid him completely. Mummy insisted that most boys Sherlock’s age were the way, that he resented Mycroft for going away and would grow out of it eventually. But Mycroft would gaze after Sherlock with such misery in his eyes that Q would hate him just a little.

Mycroft coming home was like the sun coming from behind the clouds. Q adored him, and as such grew up putting little faith in the system that made him so relentlessly unhappy. A long time ago- in less… enlightened eras- they burned people like Mycroft at the stake, on the premise that they unfailingly went mad and usually took a lot of people down with them when they did. These days, they recruited them out of school into shadowy and blood soaked work on the premise that that knife’s edge of pain in them that no soulmate would ever dull might as well be used to savage enemies of the state. It wasn’t that Mycroft didn’t have a soul mate- though people like that existed too and had been even more reviled in ages past- it was that the name written on his skin belonged to someone who had another name altogether written on _his_. Mycroft had always said it was just as well, and Q had tried to believe him, but it wasn’t until he was older that he did. To a young person, a soulmate meant little more than completeness and finding someone who would always love them- and in that regard it was most decidedly not just as well, because Mycroft loved and wanted to be loved as fiercely as anyone in the world. But, though there _were_ platonic soulmates, it generally also meant sex, passion. As an adult, Q would come to understand that Mycroft thought those things were boring and messy respectively, and had neither the time nor the interest for either.

But, as a boy, all that had been on Q’s periphery, and all he really knew was that having found- having never, ultimately, had to look for- his soulmate had never made Mycroft particularly happy, and in fact tended to do the opposite on a regular basis.

As a boy, Q had decided that he wanted nothing whatsoever do with soulmates.

On the Christmas holidays, he would sit with Mycroft by the fire, resting his head on Mycroft’s chest where _Sherlock Holmes_ curled in a little spiral over his heart and say, “I wish that was my name. I’d never treat you like he does.” Mycroft, carding his fingers through Q’s hair, would hum sympathetically, as if Q was the one suffering.

Mycroft would say, “You do know that- hmm. You do know that it doesn’t mean I don’t love _you_ , don’t you?”

“Yes,” Q would say immediately, because he had never, ever doubted that.

“I like to think it doesn’t refer to Sherlock specifically- not really. I like to think it just means that I love my family so much that I don’t need anything else.” But then, in later years, when Sherlock was self-destructing and drugs weren’t even his worst vice, Q had known it was about more than family. He had known that sometimes keeping Sherlock safe was more an obsession with Mycroft than a love as most people experienced it. He had known that, for all his intelligence, Mycroft didn’t always know himself that well.

But he’d also hated the society he lived in for having ever treated Mycroft and those like him with suspicion and disgust, for insisting that there was something inherently wrong with them. He had concluded that it was the proudest, bravest thing a person could achieve, to love without expecting or receiving anything in return, to guard and protect and make peace with the knowledge that he would never himself be guarded or protected.

And then Q fell into his own period of trouble, and when he did that had been rather like a line of dominoes as well. It had started with a bit of showing off to what he thought were likeminded people and ended with being branded a cyber terrorist and locked in a tiny cell. When Mycroft put it to him that he could stay in that cell for the rest of his life or give up his name and everything his name entailed and work for the government, it hadn’t really been much of a choice. But at the same time, it had also felt like a culmination of everything that had been in his head since he was a boy. If Mycroft could live without Sherlock when Sherlock was _right there_ , then Q could most certainly live without James Bond, whoever he was, when he’d never so much as met the man. He could put his love and his passion into serving his country and that would be that.

He gave up his name and trained himself to think as Q the Quartermaster and no one else. He came up with a rather convoluted method by which he could make contact with his brothers with no possibility of being detected, but it was understood that he would only use it in the direst emergencies.   Thus, he only saw Mycroft when they were both in their official capacities, and he never saw Sherlock at all, except through a CCTV camera.

Q’s old self vanished like so much smoke, and he sometimes thought that if he made an instant connection with a man on a bus or in a coffee shop- as one did in romantic films- and that man asked, hope shining in his eyes, if his name happened to be Sherrinford Holmes, he would say, “No, I’m sorry.   You’re looking for someone else,” and actually rather believe it was true.      

But, of course, that wasn’t how it happened. Not at all.    

*   *   *

“How are you settling in?”

“Quite well, Mr. Tanner, thank you,” Q said. He was bent over a tiny communications device and less than overjoyed to have been interrupted, but he found Tanner an efficient, largely unobnoxious sort of man and had no desire to treat him unkindly. Beyond that, it was Q’s first week in charge of Q-Branch and he knew better than to kick it off by alienating M’s right hand man. “Do you have work for me?”

Tanner didn’t seem to find the jump to work-talk rude, luckily- in fact, it seemed to please him. “Always, Quartermaster,” he replied. “It’s for 007.”

“Ah,” Q returned. “The famous 007.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“One hears of little else in Q-Branch."  Plenty of Q's little worker bees had been here for years. Pleasantly, none of them had given any sign of resenting having someone so new- so young- put in charge. Less pleasantly, all of them were most enamored of a certain agent notorious for never bringing his equipment back in good condition. Notorious, in point of fact, for rarely bringing it back at all. “What will he require?”

Tanner handed over a file with basic notes on the mission and what equipment the analysts had determined would be of use. “As you can see there’s plenty of leeway for your own judgment,” Tanner said. “As promised.”

“Yes,” Q agreed absently, already half in his own world. A gun- how pedestrian. Still, even that technology could be improved upon and even if he lost it- _when_ he lost it- 007 would make as fair a test subject as any. Even so, he did note Tanner- still there- out of the corner of his eye, and he did note the curiosity in his expression. Somewhat reluctantly, Q returned his attention to the other man. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Tanner said. “You’re a bit of a mystery man, is all.”

“Yes,” Q said again, at a loss for anything else. Most everyone had a codename at MI6 and truly comprehensive files on anyone were difficult come by, but even M knew almost nothing about Q. He was young, he had seemingly come from nowhere, and people at the highest levels had been instructed from higher levels still to give him whatever he wanted. There was nothing Q could do to help solve the mystery, of course- not even if he wanted to, and he didn’t especially.

“Don’t worry,” Tanner told him, as if he knew what Q had been thinking. “One gets used to not knowing everything.” There was a wryness in his tone, as if he wished one didn’t have to.

“That’s true,” Q replied. “I’ll need access to 007’s personal information- his medical history and so forth.”

Again there was curiosity in Tanner’s eyes, but this time nothing came of it. “Of course.” With a final nod in Q’s direction, he departed, and Q found himself with the correct access codes forthwith. Q had a certain tunnel vision with it came to his inventions, and all he really cared to know was where he could find enough of the man’s genetic information for his purposes, but even he couldn’t fail to notice- at long last- 007’s _name._

Q stared at the screen. “Bugger.”

*   *   *

Had it been purposeful, Q might have taken pride in the poor impression he made on James Bond when they finally met. As it was, Q rather agonized about the nonsense he’d spouted whenever he had a free moment. It was just as well, of course- it wasn’t as though it was important that he dazzle the man with his philosophical prowess; they weren’t going to be spouses or lovers. They weren’t even going to be friends. They were going to be colleagues, and Q wasn’t going to let the name written over his heart disrupt that.

Of course, it wasn’t long after they met that 007 almost died. Again. Several times, in fact. And Q gathered from Eve that he had very almost died before they met as well. And every time it happened, Q felt as if he heart had frozen in his chest and didn’t know what _anything_ was worth if he couldn’t even touch that man before he lost him. He thought about the fact that Bond’s luck would run out sooner or later, and what then? When he’d made his peace with never knowing his soulmate- when he’d _thought_ he’d made his peace with never knowing his soulmate- he had been operating under the assumption that he would never meet him, never work with him. Never exchange barbed words with him or see his mouth twitch with annoyance or his eyes glint with amusement. Never watch him die on a tiny computer screen and have to hide the pain in his own chest when his soulmate’s heart stopped.

Q knew that pain intimately, of course. He had felt it before- more than once- and could now trace the incidents through 007’s file. Oh, to have been matched with an accountant somewhere, Q would absently think as Bond crushed an extremely expensive communications device under his heel and took a woman with this or that piece of information to bed.

“If she stabs him,” Q would observe through gritted teeth. “It’ll serve him right.”

“Are you worried about him?” Eve would ask, amused.

“I’m a worrier,” he would say blithely, and though it wasn’t true- _that_ was his big brother- he grew fond of all the Double-O’s in his way, and made an excellent approximation of it.

*   *   *

“Did medical clear you to come to Q Branch?” The only reply Q received was a disconcerting silence from where 007 sat in the chair beside his desk. “Did you even _go_ to medical?” More silence. “Go to medical, for God’s sake!”

“No.”

“Bond.”

“No.”

They were briefly at an impasse. After a moment, Q conceded defeat with his usual mixture of sullenness and grace. He rolled his eyes and said, “You Double-O’s are going to be the death of me,” but even though he’d only been in the job a few months he already knew it was just Bond. It would always, always be Bond. Q glared unhappily at Bond’s exceedingly well-formed chest. There were people in the world who as adults never took off their shirts except in the presence of their soulmate. Of course Bond wouldn’t be like that. Q had trouble tearing his eyes away from the scar tissue that had been left behind when Eve shot Bond before and made Q- back in England all unaware- nearly run his car off the road. Of course, Bond didn’t need his shirt off for this, so it was his own fault if Q stared. “Put your shirt back on,” Q said. He was being distracted from what was important.

“Those are the very last words I’d ever hoped to hear from you,” Bond quipped. He didn’t put his shirt back on.    

Q didn’t say, ‘How can you flirt at a time like this?’ He excused not speaking to himself by saying that it would have dignified the remark, but in truth he didn’t trust his voice. He knew exactly how Bond could flirt at a time like this- doubtless it was the same strange infatuation that currently warmed the pit of Q’s stomach even as he wanted, desperately, to wring this man’s neck.

“Don’t you want to take a look at the tracker they put in me?”

“I disabled it the moment you were back on British soil.”

“Yes,” Bond said, holding out his arm. “But I’m sure it’s of interest.” Q looked down at the limb in question. The device had been quite sloppily implanted. Q’s predecessor’s technique hadn’t been perfect, but it had hardly left a mark. The people who had held 007 captive, however, had put their tracker in with no finesse whatsoever. Though it was true that Q could learn a great deal about where those people had gotten their tech from the tracker, and possibly use it to find any stragglers besides, and also true that medical might damage it in their strange zeal to put ‘person’ before ‘tech’, Q thought that under the circumstances medical was best equipped to handle this one.

He told Bond as much.

The infuriating man batted his eyelashes. “Why, Quentin, I didn’t know you cared,” he cooed. “Come on,” he gestured with his arm again.

“Do you _like_ pain? Is that what this is about?”

“Only in a controlled setting, and only if that’s what you like.” Bond leered. “But this- if you must know- is about _scienc_ e. I can take it.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean that I should dish it out,” Q said, but he reached out anyway and somehow missed the mark entirely. “Oh,” Q murmured, staring at the place where his fingertips brushed over his once-name. _Sherrinford Holmes_ stared back at him, somehow accusatory. It was different to see it- touch it- than to merely know it was there. Bond’s lack of shame notwithstanding, it was very taboo to touch someone’s mark as Q just had, even accidently. Too late to go unnoticed, Q snatched his hand away.

Bond’s eyes glinted with inappropriate amusement. “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

“I mind,” Q returned tartly. Since it was the closest thing to vengeance he could produce, Q did as Bond had suggested and removed the tracker with a device he’d designed for the purpose. A great deal more blood and tissue came away than was meant to. Q scowled, swabbed the wound with alcohol and Bond didn’t even wince. “You great masochist,” Q remarked.

“Apparently,” Bond said, in a tone that didn’t seem to have anything whatsoever to do with how much his arm probably hurt.

“Now- go to medical or I’ll call someone to drag you there.”

“Right.”

*   *   *

The names appeared over a person’s heart with a tiny flash of pain around- sometimes a little while after- the time a person’s soulmate was born.

Those with a substantial age difference between themselves and their soulmate had a difficult time of it- spending so long with no mark. There were people who waited half their lives and then, often after they’d given up on it entirely, doubled over as the name was etched on their skin. Those who never had a mark and never would often pretended to be waiting- but it was generally thought that those people knew in their hearts that the name would never come. Q didn’t know what such people knew, and he felt it best not to judge.

Daddy was old enough when it happened to remember it, but he never could explain the feeling very well. He at least talked about it, though, which Mummy never did. Daddy would tell Q- Q being, as far as he knew, the only one to ask- about how lovely their mother was, and how amazed he had been to find that someone so brilliant, so _different_ , was meant to be with someone as ordinary as him.

Mummy didn’t talk about it at all. Sherlock and Q had been born in relatively close succession and so long after Mycroft that Q sometimes suspected she’d had two more children than she’d bargained for. Mummy was distant at times without meaning to be; she was intuitive, but never especially gifted at explaining what she knew. And given what all her children went through regarding soulmates at one point or another in their lives, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that she never broached the subject.  

Like Mummy, Sherlock and Q were both born with the names already there, if too tiny to read.

Mycroft’s manifested when he was seven, as the ink on little Sherlock’s birth certificate started to dry. As Daddy told the story to Q, Mummy had seen it sometime after they all came home from the hospital, and said nothing but, “Oh. My poor boy.”

Possibly, that in itself explained a great deal about Mycroft Holmes.

*   *   *

“That man is going to be the death of me,” Q muttered to himself. He pulled off his headset- useless now that Bond’s corresponding ear comm was so much dust again- and tossed it aside in disgust. Bond hadn’t given any kind of distress signal, and Q hadn’t heard him being captured, so all he could do was wait for the agent to make contact in the traditional way.

Nothing about this little scene was at all unusual; in fact, the missions where 007 _didn’t_ pull this sort of move were exceedingly rare. What made today different was that Mycroft was there, doing one of his inspections. What, exactly, the inspections were about and who they were for even Q wasn’t cleared to know, and Mycroft was very serious about clearance. Privately, Q suspected they were on the order of one person- let’s call her… Lizzie.

At any rate, M was currently holed up in his office with Tanner trying to find a way to make the fact that a) they’d lost Bond and b) that was actually a pretty common state of affairs, sound like anything other than an utter disaster.    

No one was there, then, except for Q, Mycroft, and the underlings Q paid for their silence, so it didn’t really matter that Mycroft reached out, squeezed Q’s shoulder, and said, “Are you all right?” It didn’t really matter, except that Mycroft had seen something in Q that made him do that, despite the fact that they weren’t supposed to know each other at all. And that was a problem, because Q had nearly convinced himself that how he felt about Bond was very well hidden.

Q shrugged, and managed to keep himself from resting his cheek on Mycroft’s hand.

Somewhere across the room, a Q-Branch member hurriedly wrote something down.

Q noticed and huffed out a laugh. “You should follow me home and really give them something to think about.”

“You know that I will if you ask.”

“I do,” Q said, though he hadn’t, completely, until he heard Mycroft’s voice just then. He didn’t quite understand it, and that left him itchy. Q hated not to understand.

He’d given up his name, and with it his family, his soulmate, and everything else that that name made his. Q had known, of course- in the reason centers of his brain if not in his heart- that Mycroft wouldn’t be able to just turn it off, caring about him. But at the same time, no one turned off feelings like Mycroft. If anyone could make it so he no longer had a brother on paper and just as easily make it so he no longer had a brother in his heart, it would be- Q always thought- Mycroft Holmes.

But it was perfectly obvious in that moment that his brother hadn’t stopped caring. Looking at Mycroft in that moment, Q could see that Mycroft could- and would- sooner stop breathing than stop caring about him.  

“Do what?” Mycroft asked gently, hand not leaving Q’s shoulder. His face had softened almost imperceptibly, and there were traces of bitterness, as if he knew what Q had seen and was perhaps acutely aware of the fact that it had been a revelation. “Know? Or want me to follow you?”

Suddenly Q had to swallow around a lump in his throat. “Know. Anything else would be… unwise.”

“Unwise,” Mycroft repeated, and sighed. “Yes.”

Q wanted to turn and throw his arms around Mycroft, but there was a difference between occasionally tossing a tidbit to the bored members of Q-Branch and totally rewriting their understanding of the world. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m not going to fall apart over one missing Double-O.”

“No,” Mycroft agreed, though he sounded even less sure than he had before. Q wondered if Mycroft knew that, despite Q’s best efforts, Bond was so much more than one missing Double-O.

He thought, _Of course he knows_. But it didn’t change anything.

*   *   *

Bond didn’t die, of course.

He finally made contact about an hour after M first started talking about writing him off- like he knew exactly what had been going on in MI6 HQ- and then returned a couple of days later towards the end of Q’s shift with a mangled bit of tech cradled in his hands like some kind of botched peace offering. It was the exact same thing he always did.

“One day, I’ll have grey hairs,” Q told him, and it was the exact same thing he always said. “And they will all be your doing.”

“And on that day, Quillian, you will look very distinguished.” Bond reached out, brushing a curl of not-yet-grey hair from Q’s forehead. “You look exhausted.”

“I wonder why that should be.”

“Let me offer you a drink as an apology?”

“Go home, 007. I’m not the only one who looks exhausted.”

“Let me offer you some very acrobatic no strings attached sex as an apology?”

“Goodnight, 007.”

That exchange, too, always happened- with a few amendments to the dialogue for Q’s insults and the specific nature of Bond’s flirting. Q started to get used to it, as he started to get used to most of Bond’s… eccentricities. Q supposed that was what made him crazy.

*   *   *

“He doesn’t look like an enemy of the state, Quincy.”

“You haven’t learned that appearances can be deceiving yet, 007?” Q snapped his laptop closed on the face of his brother’s new flatmate and fixed Bond with a glare. “What you doing in my flat?”

“Saying hello?”

“A text or call would have done that admirably. A break-in rather speaks to… neediness.”

“I’ve been driven mad by your cold and continued refusal?” Bond offered.

“I cannot be the only person in the world to say no to you,” Q scoffed, though Bond’s expression didn’t exactly bolster his confidence in that regard. “I despair of humanity sometimes.”

“So do I,” Bond said. “You haven’t offered me tea.”

“Would you like some tea, 007?” Q sighed.

“Ta very much. No cream or sugar.”

Q rolled his eyes and went to get it started. Complaints aside, he didn’t completely hate it when Bond broke into his flat, provided the man wasn’t bleeding all over his furniture. Today Bond looked undamaged, and the bickering was something to do beyond stalking that strange little army doctor who was apparently the One for Sherlock. The game they played- he and James Bond- was entertaining in its way. Bond flirted, Q insulted, they both retreated, took stock, and sent forth another volley. It was… fun.

But when Q handed Bond his cup and saucer their fingers brushed and Q knew that this was the sort of fun he couldn’t afford to have. Q needed to stop teasing the man and put his foot down. He just… didn’t know _how_. This sort of thing baffled him. It always had.

So, he put it off until tomorrow, and when tomorrow came he would probably put it off again.    

*   *   *

When two soulmates met as teenagers, it was known was Romeo and Juliet syndrome in certain circles. In case that term isn’t evocative enough, it could be… messy. Combined with hormones and the sometimes incomprehensible politics of youth, finding one’s mate at that age didn’t typically end in sunshine and roses.

That wasn’t to say that _not_ finding one’s mate as a teenager was a picnic either. Sometimes all a person thought about during puberty was finding the One- and how much better things would be when they did. Young people dated, to be sure, and they agonized about what the point of it all could possibly be if that person wasn’t their match. It wasn’t until university that Q himself finally gave it a try. As a teenager, he buried his nose in a book and tried to wish it all away.  

Natural intelligence aside, school- and the level of human interaction it required- wasn’t actually easy for any of the Holmes brothers.

Mycroft, good at biting back any less than complimentary opinions of adults and making himself useful to his peers, handled it best. Mummy had tutored him herself from home before Sherlock was born, and he wasn’t enrolled in a school until Q followed along behind. Mycroft was never popular- he was pudgy, he loathed physical activity, he was too accustomed to having all the attention on him, and he could never completely hide the fact that he didn’t genuinely like anyone- but he was successful. His education looked pitch perfect on paper and no one ever said anything less than glowing about him. For Mycroft, that was all that really mattered.

Sherlock… well- it hardly bore mentioning. He showed some aptitude for science, but even then he refused to do any work that he couldn’t see the point of, and there was ultimately very little work he _could_ see the point of. He made ‘deductions’ that humiliated peers and instructors alike, and he ended up in screaming fights with fully grown adults.

Thus, it wasn’t too odd that most people had awaited Q’s turn with some degree of apprehension. But Q was a good student, a nice boy. He wasn’t as good at manipulating his peers as Mycroft had been, so he was pushed around a fair amount, but he withdrew into his studies and never resented being disliked as Sherlock not-so-secretly did. He wasn’t as good at manipulating his teachers as Mycroft had been, either- but Q saw the real point of school in way neither of his brothers ultimately had, so though he never made a very substantial impression in either direction his work had spoken for itself.  

But, of course, it wasn’t really the school part that made being those years so difficult for them, and for the younger two in particular.

Between them, Q and Sherlock met enough Jameses and Johns to people a small country before they came of age. By the time Q started university, that name- James- would ring in his ears like a forever unscratchable itch. He didn’t know what it was like for Sherlock- he never asked- but his hopes turned to bitterness so very quickly in those days, as if less than two decades on the earth was plenty of time to find his mate if that mate was at all worth finding- but, in hindsight, it must’ve been worse for Sherlock somehow.

Q never actually envied Mycroft- he was too smart for that- but he sometimes thought it must have been nice not to have a stake in the whole business. He never thought that for very long, of course- life had a way of reminding him that Mycroft did, in fact, have a stake.

When he was nineteen, Sherlock tried to burn his soul mark off- insisting that, mark or no, he would never love anyone. Q gathered that the mark remained legible after the fact- though it might have only mattered symbolically if it hadn’t, as their whole family would remember the name John Watson as long as they lived, and it was unlikely that the man, whoever he was, would ever meet some other Sherlock Holmes- but Q never physically saw what Sherlock did to himself. He just remembered the fight Sherlock and Mycroft had after.

He’d never known Mycroft to shout before- but people across the channel probably heard both of them that day.

“What do you care?” Sherlock had snarled. “You want it gone!”

“That’s not true,” Mycroft had bellowed back. Q had seen them standing closer than they ever had before, not touching, but near enough to share breath. Mycroft softened. “It’s not true,” he repeated quietly.

Sherlock looked almost… stricken.

“I just want you to be happy.”

“I’m not.”

“I know,” Mycroft returned, a world of pain in his eyes. “If I could fix it…” He raised a hand, as if to brush a stray curl from Sherlock’s forehead, as he habitually and unthinkingly did with Q, and Sherlock flinched away. Mycroft jerked his hand back, and swallowed. “One day, perhaps once you meet him, you’ll feel better.”  

“Will I?” Sherlock asked, broodingly.

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly know, would I?” Mycroft snapped.

Sherlock was a picture of shock and Q- forgotten in the corner of the room- couldn’t have looked much better, though they were undoubtedly reacting to different things. Sherlock probably couldn’t believe Mycroft had admitted to not knowing something. Q couldn’t believe that he’d actually spoken of his own situation. Q had never known Mycroft to utter a single reproach to Sherlock on the subject in all their lives.

Mycroft’s expression contorted briefly, and he walked away. Q looked at Sherlock and couldn’t even begin to understand what he saw in his face. He didn’t try; he followed Mycroft to his room.

By the time Q got there, Mycroft was curled up in his bed, back to the door. Q climbed in next to him, wrapping himself around Mycroft’s back. “Hey you,” Mycroft murmured, hands over Q’s hands. “I’m sorry you had to see that.” Though it had to sometimes be the case, Mycroft never looked at Q as though he wished he was Sherlock.

“S’okay,” Q said, and just held on. He dozed for a while, but he would later remember hearing a sound in the doorway- a step and an unhappy huff- and feeling eyes on him.

He would put that from his mind.

*   *   *

“If you think the tea and pastry in your hands will in any way make up for that watch you fed to a komodo dragon, you’ve got another thing coming, 007.”

Something- the second cousin twice removed of a wince- happened on Bond’s face and was gone in a heartbeat. Somewhere, however, one of Q’s minions had made note of it and added it to an ongoing spreadsheet. Bond didn’t know about the spreadsheets, of course- and would have only made a lewd joke if he did- and so when he replied his face was clear and he was unaware that anything else had been catalogued. “It was an alligator that time, Quinlan,” Bond said.

“Of course- how could I have ever confused the two?”

And Bond smiled slightly and set his offering on Q’s worktable. “What have you got for me?” He peered over Q’s shoulder.

“Nothing,” Q replied. “This is for 006. 006 is my favorite.”

“Nonsense,” Bond said, annoyingly cheerful.

Q rolled his eyes and put his work aside for a while. The tech was actually for 003, but the first few times Q had spoken fondly of 006- who Q knew was a particular friend of Bond’s, inasmuch as the man had friends- it had provoked something rather like jealousy. Unfortunately, Bond seemed to be on to him, and there was now not enough data to warrant another spreadsheet.

He took a bite of his pastry, thanked Bond only a little resentfully, and waited to be left in peace. Bond stayed. “What do you want?” Q asked, mouth full.

“I like watching you eat.” Bond did indeed look horribly affectionate. “You should let me take you to dinner. I know a little place-”

“No.”

“Hmm?”

“ _No_.”

Bond tilted his head to one side. “Give me one good reason why you won’t have dinner with me.”

Six immediately presented themselves. Three were moderately to extremely offensive and might do the trick of discouraging the man, but would suggest that Q had thought about it enough to come up with arguments, and that didn’t bear admitting. The fourth was the truth, and was therefore impossible. The fifth- that he had an engagement every night for the foreseeable future, or was in fact engaged- might not have the appropriate effect. Thus- “I don’t eat.”

“You do.”

“Prove it,” Q said, chewing again.

“I like to think that I have,” Bond returned immediately. “But if dinner is out, a drink ought to be acceptable.”      

“It isn’t.”

“ _Why_?”

“Because-”

It was inappropriate to be pleased when there was a major crisis and James Bond was needed halfway across the world forthwith, but Q definitely was.

*   *   *

The spreadsheets Q-Branch was working on noted a number of trends, the most profound of which being that the Quartermaster’s consistent rebuffing of his advances had only made 007 more determined to flirt his face off, rather than less. If ever a more unhelpful trend had been noted in Q-Branch, it had been before this Q’s time.

Fractionally more useful was the following: James Bond joked when he was being tortured, and he could manufacture or mask more or less any emotion he pleased, but there were two things about Q that actively garnered a negative reaction:

1\. James Bond disliked that Q never called him ‘James’ and only rarely went so far as to call him ‘Bond’, preferring to say ‘007.’ Any annoyance he might have felt at Q’s suggested preference for other agents seemed to be tempered by the fact that Q also called them by their codenames.

2\. James Bond disliked that he himself knew Q only by that name or Quartermaster. As such, he called Q by a different name every day, hoping that- since the previous M’s title had corresponded to her real name- Q’s would do the same and he might eventually light on it.  

The purpose of the spreadsheets, in Q’s opinion, was simple: Bond confused him, and any data had to demonstrate an improvement.

Q’s initial bad impression on Bond hadn’t lasted, and all his subsequent efforts to compound it had failed. The man flirted with him constantly- over the comms, in Q’s office, in Q’s flat, and even occasionally in meetings. It was so horribly unprofessional that it would have driven Q crazy even if it wasn’t Bond doing it- then again, if it wasn’t Bond doing it, Q would’ve let him have his date long ago and dispensed with all this tension while it was still bearable. Q was a genius, true, and entirely capable of making all the exploding pens in the world should he take it into his head to do so- and he wouldn’t because they were tacky, not because it was his way of playing hard to get- but he wasn’t exactly interesting.

The knowledge that if they did go to dinner Bond would quickly tire of the whole business was not as comforting as Q might wish it would be. In fact, it might have disappointed him a very little bit, which was nonsensical in the extreme.      

Q knew perfectly well that Bond was no romantic. How else could he have fallen for- and who could ever doubt that he had loved Vesper Lynd?- a woman who had someone else’s name written over her heart? How could he have fallen for her when he himself did? People who had not yet met their soulmates, or whose mate had already died, did have… relations at times- but this was only for fun, relaxation. Those who fell in love easily waited, and did so quite cheerfully. Bond was clearly not the type to wait. If he thought at all about the name written over his heart, it was not evident.

Sometimes, indeed, he acted very like the sort of person with no name written there at all and even though Q had seen it with his own eyes and touched it with his own fingers he still periodically checked old footage to see if it was really there. It always was, but Q still found himself certain that he was like Mycroft, matched to someone constitutionally incapable of returning the emotion.

As if it mattered if he was. As if Q cared whether Bond could love him.

*   *   *

It was meant to be an easy recruitment assignment.

Q was _important_ \- he was responsible for some of the most significant advancements the British Intelligence service had seen in decades, and though there were people in the higher echelons of power who thought of certain MI6 agents and assets as expendable, Q would not have been among them even if Mycroft Holmes hadn’t made it very clear to everyone who mattered that no harm was to come to him. But Mycroft Holmes had made it very clear indeed, which made it in turn even more unlikely- unlikely as it had already been- that Q would ever see any action.

The point is that if anyone, anywhere, had had even the smallest reason to suspect that this meet and greet would end with Q bleeding on the concrete floor of a parking structure, it wouldn’t have happened.

But, since it did happen, Q thought he could probably have been excused for not having a plan in place for the eventuality that he might die in the field while talking to 007 through an earpiece. He’d gone over it dozens- perhaps hundreds- of times the other way around, but as it was… Q had nothing to fall back on. Nothing at all.  

“Isn’t this supposed to be the other way around?” Bond said, as if he had thought about it too. There was horrible tightness in his voice.

“Well,” Q said, ignoring how similar their trains of thought had been, “I suppose that depends on how you think things are ‘supposed to be.’” Q wasn’t in a lot of pain at the moment, which he had an idea was a bad sign, but he had a great deal of difficulty focusing on anything- even Bond’s voice.

“You won’t die,” Bond said. “You owe me that drink.”

“Ha,” Q managed. “You forget- we were never going to have that drink.”

“Sure we were. I’d have worn you down.”

“Didn’t want you to wear me down.”

“I know.” Bond sounded bizarrely sad, just then. Hurt, even. “That’s what I never got. We’d be good together. We… fit.”

“ _That’s_ what you want to talk about?”

“We have to talk about something until the rescue team gets to you, and I don’t know anything about tech.”

“Such has been painfully obvious throughout our acquaintance.”

Bond gave a strained laugh. “See? Witty banter. Don’t you like the witty banter?”

“It seemed unlikely that we would lose it.”

“True. But we could have had it in _bed_.” Bond sighed. “Everyone in Q branch told me you were sensitive on the subject, but I don’t get it.”

“You asked Q branch how I felt about being propositioned?”

“After the actual propositioning part fell flat, yes. Those that don’t think you’re secretly married to some posh guy in a suit warned me that it was a sore spot nevertheless, but… I have never flirted so hard in my life.”  

“Your technique needs work.”

“My technique is flawless. You need to lighten up.”

“Don’t you care? At all? About-”

“Is this about that name?” Bond asked. “You did react more strongly than I expected. The man might as well have died before I was born for all I know about him. What’s more, I don’t care if I ever know more. I do not believe in destiny, and I think God or whoever the hell is in charge of these things had no business deciding who I belong with and stamping their name on me for the rest of my life. I want to decide what I like, and it just so happens I like you. I just wanted that to be enough. I wanted to go for a drink, see where things went. I’m not exactly what you’d call a wonderful boyfriend, but I’m willing to bet that you aren’t either. You’ve been good for me and I thought maybe we could be good for each other. People make too much of these things.”

“They do, don’t they?” Q murmured.

“I thought… for a while there, I thought Vesper felt that way too. But she didn’t. Nobody does, I guess. But I thought you were different.”

“There is something oddly romantic in that, 007. Sorry to disappoint.”

“Don’t apologize- you-”

“But I _am_ sorry,” Q choked, and he was. Everything had gone so horribly wrong and it was quite impossible, suddenly, to see any good reason for it. “This is going to _hurt_. You don’t know- you have no idea…” Q recalled the last time it had happened- because it had happened with depressing regularity- and it seemed to him that he had hurt more then than he did now- now that he was actually dying. He murmured, remembering, “When your heart stops…”

“It’s your heart stopping.”

“Yes. But _you’ll_ feel it. I always…”              

*   *   *

Q had always been reasonably self-sufficient, even before he was Q, and so it was easy enough to tell himself that he wasn’t… lonely. Sherlock would probably have seen the lie in that from one look at how Q had done his tie, though Q had no idea how. He was as smart as Sherlock- smarter, in his way- but the minutiae of human appearance and any conclusions one might draw from it had always escaped him.  

All three of them had always had trouble relating to other people. All three of them coped with that feeling that they were aliens on their own planet in different ways: Mycroft by reducing everyone to tiny pieces in a giant puzzle, individual ants in the larger anthill of national and international politics that was his domain; Sherlock by turning them all into codes to be decoded, each little detail bringing him one step closer to knowing everything about them in one look; and Q by dispensing with other people altogether and burying himself in technology- because machines did what he wanted- they never talked back or lashed out, and if they malfunctioned they were easily fixed- and code never hurt anyone accidentally, not like people did.

So he had always been isolated, even from his own family- a fact that, for some reason, didn’t make it any easier not to see them anymore when he became the Quartermaster.

For all Q knew- he could never bring himself to ask- Mummy and Daddy thought he was dead. It was possible that there had even been a funeral. Sherlock probably knew the truth, and if he did Q doubted the knowledge that Mycroft had erased their little brother had warmed things between them in any way. As much as it pained him to imagine their relationship growing even more strained than it was there was nothing Q could do about any of it. That wasn’t his life anymore.  

The job Mycroft had found for him was his life, and- in a way- Q-Branch did eventually become his family.

A nosy, annoying little family.

Q-Branch being like it was, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that they spied on each other occasionally. Or constantly, depending on how much leeway you want to give them. Since very few of them had what might be called a personal life, and those existed almost exclusively online, the files were generally pretty thin- metaphorically speaking, anyway, since most of the time they were digital, or even purely mental, in nature.

Thus, one thing Q didn’t know about- or at least didn’t know  about at first, since very little ultimately went on in Q-Branch that he didn’t eventually find out about- were the other spreadsheets, the ones more on Q than Bond.

There were spreadsheets about the things 007 did that made Q roll his eyes, smile a tiny smile he thought no one would see, or go white as a sheet and look like he was being shot at himself.

There were also spreadsheets about the Man with the Umbrella.

Most of Q-Branch was aware that the Man with the Umbrella was high on the food chain- so high no one was even allowed to ask who he was- and he visited rarely enough that the data on those spreadsheets was spotty at best, so Q-Branch had decided instead to supplement them by taking very extensive notes on the subject. They noted the way Q would try so hard not to smile whenever the Man with the Umbrella visited MI6, and fail completely. They noted the way the Man with the Umbrella’s eyes would crinkle fondly whenever Q had a new invention to show off. They noted the ease with which they followed each other’s ideas, and the fact that though neither of them was much given to displays of affection they sometimes casually touched without seeming to realize it.      

Q gathered from the notes that most of Q-Branch, all the Double-O’s, and even Mycroft’s ex-Double-O personal assistant, had developed the impression that they were secret lovers- spouses, even. It didn’t help that Mycroft wore a ring on his right hand, and some intrepid agent had discovered- when Q fell asleep at his work station- that Q wore a matching ring on a chain around his neck. When Mycroft was in MI6 headquarters one day and Q mentioned his underlings’ conclusions to him, his mouth had quirked. “I suspected as much,” he smiled.

It was just as well that Mycroft found it so amusing. Q himself had trouble seeing the funny side, given that the rings were family heirlooms. Mycroft had begun wearing his from more or less that time he came of age, because he was- for a given value of the term- taken, and he didn’t want anyone to doubt it. Q had kept his tucked away, frequently forgotten, for many years. Just after he became the Quartermaster, Q began to wear his the same way Mycroft did. In one of their last meetings together outside work, they had drinks at Mycroft’s club. Mycroft said nothing about the ring, but something about the way his eyes fixed to it hurt, and Q started wearing it on a chain around his neck instead. He never knew if it served as a reminder of what he would never have, or as a promise that there was still hope. Or, he sometimes thought, perhaps it was somehow both.          

*   *   *

Q was mildly- and perhaps not altogether happily- surprised when he woke up. He was sore, but fuzzily so- drugged, he supposed. He was in MI6 medical branch, or perhaps somewhere even more secret, and apparently not dead.

There was a hand wrapped around his, tight enough for him to feel that, if nothing else.

His eyes slid up the arm attached to the hand and felt something fierce and hot and bright in his chest. He wondered once again if the universe had possibly made a mistake, with him and the name written over his heart, because he could imagine no circumstances in which he would be happier to see 007 than he was to see his brother just then.  

Mycroft was in his shirtsleeves. He looked bone tired, but even so Q had difficulty imagining circumstances wherein he would have felt secure enough to fall asleep like that, head pillowed on the bed next to their joined hands. But then Q looked around some more and saw Sherlock in his dark coat, lurking in the doorway like an oversized crow. He saw a small blond man in a lumpy jumper outside the door and recognized John Watson. He knew that things had evened out between Mycroft and Sherlock since Sherlock met John. Though he still sometimes ached to think about it, Q understood that Mycroft was happier too, knowing someone else was looking out for Sherlock as well. That Mycroft had never expected or even wanted Sherlock to act like a soulmate to him. That loving from a distance and receiving nothing in return was what Mycroft ultimately did best, even when it hurt him. Though Q still thought that John Watson, at least, might have been a little kinder if he knew what was written over Mycroft’s heart, he also knew that Mycroft did not require kindness from the doctor.

In order to so much as move one hand, Q had to think about it very hard, and as he was thinking about it Sherlock stepped forward.  “You’re awake,” he said. He pitched his voice low, and Q supposed that Mycroft must have been truly exhausted to get such consideration out of their brother.

“Well spotted,” Q replied. His voice was quiet too, though mainly because he couldn’t manage much more. “You should be a detective, you.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

“How much do you know?” Q asked after a moment.

“I have been ever-so-graciously informed of the parts which are not classified.” At Q’s raised brow, Sherlock elaborated: “That you were injured.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I can discern somewhat more than that, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I know that you were injured in the line of duty, but that your work does not usually put you in physical danger. I know that you get out very little in your current job and rarely interact with anyone at all apart from your coworkers and Mycroft, all of whom were both surprised and distressed by… what happened. Your injuries were severe but not ultimately life-threatening, and yet you believed you were going to die, so I suspect that no rescue was planned because there was never meant to be any danger. I take this to mean that you were meeting with someone we considered a potential ally, or at least not an outright enemy- most likely someone with a technological expertise, as you were the one sent to explain what Britain had to offer. You were shot, however, and you expected to die. Believing this, you said something- over a secure communication line, not a cell-phone, so it was to a coworker- that you now regret saying. I assume it regarded… feelings.” Sherlock cocked his head to one side. “Sentiment suits you as poorly as it does Mycroft.”

Q gritted his teeth and did not reply to that one.

Sherlock’s assessing gaze grew heavy, and there was something frighteningly tender in his voice when he said, “I had not thought you had found your soul mate, Sherrinford.”

“No? Well, I didn’t want you to. He couldn’t have lived in Alaska, could he? It would’ve been too bloody easy.”

Sherlock opened his mouth and then closed it again, frowning. He looked… sad, and it was so bizarre that Q wondered if he was really awake at all. “It’s not…” Sherlock turned uncharacteristically hesitant. “It’s not something to avoid.” His eyes flickered to the doorway where he could see his army doctor. “Lord knows, I feared it once, but-”

“I’m not talking to you about this,” Q said. “This is a dream or something.”

“Shall I pinch you?”

“Please don’t.”

Mycroft was obviously very tired indeed to still be asleep- either that or he was awake and pretending not to be to let Q talk to Sherlock in peace. Either way, Q finally managed to reach out to him, fingers brushing soft hair.

Mycroft moved, blinking sleepily.

“Tell Sherrinford that he isn’t dreaming,” Sherlock said.

Though he blinked a few more times, Mycroft didn’t look too confused, so most likely he’d been at least partially awake. “I regret not,” he said. He squeezed Q’s hand.   “How do you feel?”

“Not bad,” he replied, squeezing back. “I guess they gave me the good drugs.” He tugged on Mycroft’s hand. “C’mere.” Though the beds were big in whatever special medical facility Mycroft had put him in, it still took some doing for Mycroft to lie down next to him, and even more for to Q to touch as much of him as possible without jostling anything important. He couldn’t comfortably rest his head on Mycroft’s chest as he preferred to, but it was good enough to be side by side for the time being. As he got situated, Q happened to glance at Sherlock. In the split second it took for Sherlock realize he’d been seen, Q beheld what could only be interpreted as jealousy in his eyes. There was longing there, too- a look sufficiently like the one Mycroft had cast in Sherlock’s direction countless times to be downright eerie- and for a moment Q was angry to see it, as if all the love and affection Sherlock could possibly have wanted hadn’t been there for the taking this whole time.

But then Q thought about Sherlock- for whom human emotions were the only unsolvable mystery- and realized it wasn’t that simple.

Q recognized the hurt in Sherlock's eyes from so many half-forgotten instances, and he realized that Sherlock wasn’t, in fact, the only one to blame for the awkwardness between them. It would never have been easy for Mycroft to break through Sherlock’s defenses and make him understand that he loved him unconditionally- but it was possible that he could have tried harder than he did. Sherlock loved both his siblings, such as he could; Q knew that- but somewhere along the line he and Mycroft seemed to have decided it wasn’t enough. Maybe, by not trying harder, they- but Mycroft especially- had somehow silently told Sherlock that what he had to give wasn’t worth fighting for.  

It took two to make an estrangement, after all, and Sherlock had only ever managed to pull so far away because Mycroft had let him, as he would never have done if Q had withdrawn like that.

Maybe, in his way, what Sherlock had meant all those years ago when he’d said, ‘You want it gone,’ was, ‘You would like me better if it was gone.’

And, just maybe, it was a little bit true.  

If things were easier between them now that John Watson had come into the picture, it might well be because Sherlock had begun to understand love a little better- and perhaps he now knew that if Mycroft resented him it didn’t mean that he didn’t love him too. And yet, even understanding that and wanting to move forward, he had been shrugging Mycroft off his whole life and now didn’t think himself able to ask for the contact Q found as easy as breathing.

In that moment, Q felt sorry for Sherlock. The emotion was quite alarming.

Once Mycroft’s arm was around him, though, Q honestly forgot about Sherlock altogether, and though he knew that Mycroft _never_ forgot about Sherlock altogether, he certainly approximated it well. Softly, Mycroft said, “You ought to have told me about Bond.”

“I suppose I… I thought you knew,” Q returned.

“You flatter me,” Mycroft returned with a slightly bitter laugh. “I’m sure I must have known the name once, but I forgot it. Or, at the very least, when his name began to cross my desk I never quite… processed it in that light. What we did when we deleted your identity… effectively giving up on your ever finding him… to think that you would wind up working for the same people.”

“It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

“I was going to say rather miraculous.” When Q stared at him, Mycroft sighed. “What we did was not meant to be a punishment, just a means to an end.”

“I know that.”

“And yet you think it was to be at the expense of your happiness?”

“Don’t know if my happiness has anything to do with it,” Q said, frowning. “For one thing, the man is a menace.”

Mycroft laughed quietly. “That much I’ll grant you.”

“Thank you,” Q replied, dubiously. “For another, we can’t exactly carry on as we were, can we?   I can never be his handler again, and besides… there are no bonded Double-O’s for a reason. He loves his work and I love mine. I _liked_ how we were. I would never have said anything if I didn’t legitimately think I was about to die.”

“And why did you say something then?” Mycroft asked, in that gentle prompting tone he always used with Sherlock when he thought their brother was on the cusp of deducing something extremely important.

“Because he would feel my death and I wanted to warn him. He deserved to…” Q trailed off. That wasn’t all there was to it and Q had never been able to lie to Mycroft, even by omission. “Also, there was a moment that it all seemed so dreadfully unfair. But I think that was blood loss talking.” Q remembered Sherlock and glanced sidelong at him, half expecting his brother to have slipped out when he realized emotions were being discussed. But there Sherlock still was.

“Ah, you little fool,” Mycroft said, fondly. Q felt Mycroft’s smile against his temple.

Sherlock must not have noticed Q watching him that time, because he reacted to the words as if he’d been slapped. Q understood what a source of contention intelligence had always been between them- how bitterly Sherlock had always resented the fact that Q could easily get praise from Mycroft- and from everyone- for his work in mathematics and engineering, while Sherlock’s own intelligence- manifesting as it did in a manner far more similar to their older brother’s- was so consistently criticized. But Q had always known something else Sherlock didn’t- being called a fool wasn’t always meant to be an insult. But Sherlock wasn’t really reacting to the words this time as much to the fondness he heard in Mycroft’s voice. And again, after so long missing it entirely, Q managed to identify jealousy in Sherlock’s face, and again he found himself feeling sorry for his brother.

Q tried to put it from his mind, and said to Mycroft, “I take it you see a solution?”

“It will be complicated, I grant you,” Mycroft said. “And you will, unfortunately, not be able to have everything. But I am damned if I will let you not have this.”

“Oh,” Q managed, surprised by the ferocity in Mycroft’s voice. Beyond it, Q heard regret- and wondered if Mycroft was not, in fact, keenly aware that he had failed with Sherlock, and was- as he so often did- channeling what he’d never managed to have himself into Q. “Well. All right then. If he even wants-”

“He will,” Mycroft said, confidently.      

*   *   *

Q’s “Reasons not to date James Bond” list, were he to have committed it to paper, might have looked something like this:

1\. Dating is a waste of valuable time, no matter who it’s with. Have you seen my schedule lately?

2\. We’re colleagues. It would make things messy when we broke up, which we would.

~~3\. Bond doesn’t really care about me. He just wants to add another notch to his bedpost. Once that’s done… see #2.~~

3\. Even if it did work out, what kind of relationship can a Double-O really maintain? See #2.

4\. I myself am shit at relationships. See #2.

5\. #2 is really very important.

It all came back to the job, the thing Q gave up everything for. Well- technically Q gave up everything to get out prison, but Mycroft would have known that getting him out of prison was only worth the ink on the order if it put Q in a job he would find worth the sacrifice. A job he would love. And he did love it.

He loved it a lot more than he’d ever intended to love James Bond, anyway- but somewhere along the line it seemed that too had gone wrong.  

*   *   *

“So. Sherrinford.”

Q groaned theatrically. “I never liked that name.”

“I admit I sometimes had difficulty imagining using it,” Bond said, so casually it was as though he hadn’t broached a deeply complicated subject.

Determinedly, Q skirted the issue. “Anyway, only Sherlock uses it now.”

“Sherlock. Your brother.”

“Was there a question in there, 007?”

“James, please.”

Q had to work hard to get his mouth around it. “James.” The agent had arrived at his beside some time ago with a deck of cards. Q was happy enough for the distraction, but Bond was so clearly distracted himself that the conversation consistently foundered. Q had never known the man to flounder like this.

“He’s- Sherlock, he’s-” Bond seemed to be searching for an inoffensive adjective. Eventually he said, “The two of you resemble each other.”

“I’ve been given to understand that Sherlock is the more handsome.”

“Have you?”

“Well. I never agreed. I suppose if one has no objection to having one’s face sliced to pieces by those cheekbones there might be some appeal.”

“I would object,” Bond laughed. “Strenuously.”

Q eyed him. There was a warmth in Bond’s eyes and in his voice that made Q actually want to call him James. This was the closest Q expected he’d get to hearing, ‘I only have eyes for you’ and it was a deal closer than he’d ever hoped. “James,” he said, and immediately could think of nothing else.

The warmth in those eyes deepened. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

As much as he wanted to, Q couldn’t bring himself to say that it was because it wasn’t exactly easy to insist to James Bond that they were soulmates. He was looking not at 007 or even Bond- he was looking at James, and Q found himself physically incapable of blaming the man for anything that had happened. “I gave up my _name_ ,” he said. “And when I did, I gave up everything that name meant, and that included this. How could I just-”

“Your other brother assures me that it was never meant to be like that- and suggesting he got something wrong seems to be some form of treason.”

Q chuckled, thinking of how many times over Sherlock would have been jailed in that case, and James laughed along with him. “But do you want this?” Q pressed when they quieted. “I remember what you said about soulmates.”

“Do you know, even as I said it I had a feeling that would come back to haunt me? It’s… not as simple as I made it sound.”

“But it is true.”

“Yes. It’s true.”

Q smiled.

James looked faintly surprised. “Most people would find that offensive.”

“Most people aren’t me.” Q sighed. “If you hadn’t been… you, I might have gone for that drink with you. I might not. I would never have wanted to be just another notch on your bedpost. But I also hated the thought that if I was more than that, it was only because of my name. This whole business… I don’t know how much I’m allowed to tell you about myself, but those marks very nearly tore my family apart. They _make_ your future, you know. It doesn’t always seem fair, not to be able to choose these things.”

“I can tell you truly,” Bond said, taking his hand, “that I’m no more interested in getting to know you better now than I was before. But since someone up there does think that we’re meant to be- I can’t wait to see why.”

“Everything’s going to change.”

“I’m not afraid if you aren’t.”

Though it was the last thing he’d ever anticipated, Q meant it when he said, “I’m not.”     


End file.
